Flooding solutions complex, costly

Town officials and property owners say there is no easy or inexpensive fix. While many parts of Chapel Hill and Carrboro were affected, the worst damage was to properties in floodplains and watersheds hit with an unusual amount of water.“I hope people have the context of this being a record-setting rainfall,” Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said. “You don’t necessarily plan for a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Sue Burke, Chapel Hill’s stormwater management engineer, said the answer isn’t as simple as bigger pipes or floodwalls. It will require looking at each creek basin to mitigate the flooding that results when underground culverts back up, she said.The town’s largest commercial area lies at the bottom of several hills, along three state highways, and in the Bolin and Booker creek floodplains. In the past, drivers heading east to Durham would take a two-lane road through swampland and forest.

That changed in the 1950s when the state built the U.S. 15-501 Bypass. In 1960, Eastgate was built. University Mall followed in 1973 after low-lying areas were raised 6 feet using dirt from higher ground. There were no rules about building in a floodplain.The last major flood at Eastgate, in 2000, cost millions, forcing some businesses to move.

A consultant’s 2001 study concluded there wasn’t a solution, but the damage could be limited. Property owner Federal Realty Investment Trust tore up the parking lot to clean and expand the parking guidance system. Merchants were required to get flood insurance, and the town agreed to keep downstream culverts clean and build a park to help drain the water.

Eastgate merchants said they suffered less damage this time. Deirdre Johnson, Federal Realty’s senior director of asset management, said they’re still assessing the cost, but the upgrades worked as expected.The damage also was limited at University Mall, where stormwater drainage and basins were added to the parking lot several years ago.

Burke said the town is working with a consultant to study stormwater and new ways to control it in the Ephesus-Fordham corridor. The work is part of the Chapel Hill 2020 Plan, which calls for extending Elliott Road south across Fordham Boulevard, creating space for office, retail and residential buildings. Rams Plaza, which also drains toward Eastgate, and the Village Plaza shopping center also would be redeveloped.At Camelot Village, where 60 percent of the apartments were condemned, the answers are complicated..

Camelot Village owns the strip of land surrounding Bolin Creek, but property manager Joel Duvall said the creek is in the public right of way and stormwater comes from properties upstream. Town officials point out Estes Drive, Franklin Street and Fordham Boulevard are all state-maintained highways, but the Department of Transportation doesn’t consider rare flooding when designing roads.

“The culvert drainage system is designed to handle normal rainfall and the occasional major storm without incidents of flooding, and the system in that area does that,” spokesman Steve Abbott said..The situation is slightly different at the Rocky Brook Mobile Home Park in Carrboro, which also was built next to a creek.

Layton Curl, who owns several flooded trailers, blames the vacant Triem-Electric Inc. property across the street for most of the problem. Both properties lie at the bottom of South Greensboro Street, a steep drop that channels stormwater from downtown. There are very few stormwater pipes on either property, and water spilling over at Triem rushes into Rocky Brook. From there, it goes into a pipe under the street, which can back up quickly.

It may seem like a stretch, but it’s actually similar to what Abramowitz did in forming Arava Power when he moved to Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava desert from Boston some seven years ago. As he likes to tell, he walked out of the family’s kibbutz home one morning, felt the strong sun beating into his arm and thought, ‘They’ve gotta be doing a lot with all this sun power.”

From there, it was a relatively short, albeit heavily bureaucratic road to the establishment of Arava Power, which built the country’s first solar-power field at Ketura, and will be building its second just across the road in a few months. Abramowitz and his partners also started Energiya Global Capital, with funding from the US government and private companies, aiming to build solar fields in Rwanda, Haiti, Romania and another handful of countries. While in Rwanda, Abramowitz, who has five children, two of whom were adopted from Ethiopia, is also partnering with a youth village where orphans of the Rwandan genocide will be raised and educated, and where a solar field is being constructed.

For Abramowitz, the perennial activist, all of these efforts, whether to save energy or children or Russian Jews back in the day, are about acting for the benefit of the world, using Israel’s wealth of knowledge, its acknowledged smarts, to do “some good things for the State of Israel.”

It was a short while after Better Place had declared bankruptcy when Abramowitz was on an airplane — one of the frequent transatlantic flights he makes nowadays, as he aims to grow Arava Power into a global provider of solar energy — sleepless on the 15-hour flight back from the West Coast. Familiar with Better Place from the start, when he’d attempted to convince founder Shai Agassi to use solar energy to power up the changeable batteries, Abramowitz was contemplating the company’s future, counting up the Facebook ‘likes’ he’d received for a much-read op-ed he’d written on the subject for a local Jerusalem paper.

He’d called the piece “Bitter Place,” recalled Abramowitz, writing that the company could be scooped up for pennies on the dollar and run like a start-up.His brain started churning, and he quickly drafted a letter to the government-appointed liquidators, and began working on a model for saving Better Place.

When the company had declared bankruptcy at the end of May, it was appointed a receiver — a liquidator who was supposed to look at company assets and try to find a buyer in order to satisfy the company’s $40 million in debt and obligations to investors. The company has only $9.5 million in assets and has lost over $800 million since it was established — $454 million of that last year alone. Part of the problem stemmed from Agassi’s original plan to build battery switching stations — there are 38 in Israel, the largest network in the world so far — which drove overhead costs up, as each one cost some $500,000 to construct.

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